Elegant interaction?

Since when the UX design has been so obsessed with manipulating user’s mind model and soliciting user behaviour? The user experience specialists today are not as noble as they were when their job has shifted from empowering users through interaction to dig money more efficiently for the Wall Street capitals. Given that many mature design guides on the market, all they need to do is to figure out the shortest way to guide user through the jungle of information with that button, and carefully set sweet traps which users may step into without noticing and pay more. The big blue button is all what users are supposed to see and interact with. The interaction is no more than a medium through which both user and service provider make a deal. Some even argue that, the best experience is you achieve something without conscious. But is this the real interaction that we want?

Unlike one can acquire good piano playing techniques after a certain period of practice, interacting with the touch screen interface today, ordering a pizza for example, does not necessarily bring user the joy of proficiency in interacting with the technology, despite the fortunate coupon you have applied. You feel accomplished, only upon receiving the bag of meal after walking through all the pages and instructions.

How can we re-think of interaction so that it brings joy on its own behalf? Like the Starck’s juicer, a stand-alone piece of art which brings you aesthetic visual pleasure. Or a Harley-Davidson cruiser that responds to your passion with instant humming and hustling which makes the journey itself full of fun rather than the destination.

Of course, one can argue that the daily job that people do are not necessarily enjoyable in terms of the process, rather they would get it done really fast and dirty. A shortcut that consists of key-press and mouse-click has already life easier for programmers, secretaries, and even video game players. But if one step a bit backward, does the combination make any sense out of the context in the software? Or across software? Control+Option with horizontal cursor drag may change the size of the brush in Photoshop but it does not summon the same effect in another painting app and nor in a 3D modelling app. The interaction doesn’t bring you any extra sense of fulfilment other than the brush effect, not to mention the sorrow to remember it when you were learning to handle all these commands. After a long-day work, when you close your laptop or blackout the screen, lean back on the cosy chair and looking at your dumb twisted fingers, you wonder, why would I have to do so? Isn’t it the ultimate goal of designing interaction that empower people with higher efficiency and even with joy along the journey?

Forget the mundane mouse click and arbitrary keyboard combination in endless layers of windows, and let’s reimagine interaction.

Prof. Wendy and Prof. Michel proposed Instrumental Interaction[1][2] back in 2000, aiming at breaking the limits of current WIMP framework of interaction. Twenty years later, the dominant paradigm of one set of keyboard and one mouse interaction didn't change at all. Though touch screen has shown more favour in new mobile devices but it does not essentially change the WIMP framework and assumes human finger as no more than just another cursor(in fact it is even less versatile and flexible than a mouse cursor). You must remember the first time you slide-unlock the iphone, you pinch-zoom the photos, you drag-release to refresh the feeds. Those were such magic moments. And then what? In the following one and half decade, people won't evolve from ten finger to 100, so gestures don't change.

Do we lack evangelists? Or is there any irreconcilable contradiction between a new interaction paradigm with humanity, or other stakeholders behind?

References

1. Michel Beaudouin-Lafon. Instrumental interaction: An interaction model for designing post-wimp user interfaces. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’00, pages 446–453, New York, NY, USA, 2000. ACM

2. Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and Wendy E Mackay. Reification, polymorphism and reuse:

three principles for designing visual interfaces. In Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces , pages 102–109, 2000.